TinyTerm, WDS-II and Excel VBA

[yehoshua.krupnick]

Can anyone help me with using Excel together with TinyTerm, please?

My company's G/L is based on WDS-II. The current procedure is to run
reports on the UNIX box, then FTP them over to the Windows network. The
reports then get massaged into Excel tables.

What I would like to do is have Excel command WDS-II via TinyTerm to
run the reports that I need, on a schedule which I set up.

I have tried using SendKeys, with not much success. TinyTerm seems to
need to be prodded through.

I am now trying DDE. I initiate a channel using DDEInitiate, but
nothing seems to happen when I use the DDEExecute command.

Am i doing anything wrong with the above methods? Is there a better way
to do this? I will try anything, and substitute the software above for
any freeware programs, but I need to be able to have the process
handled from beginning to end, automatically and unattended.

I'd greatly appreciate any ideas. Thanks!

 

[Skot]

Can anyone help me with using Excel together with TinyTerm, please?

My company's G/L is based on WDS-II. The current procedure is to run
reports on the UNIX box, then FTP them over to the Windows network. The
reports then get massaged into Excel tables.

What is WDS-II?

I have my UNIX software output files as tab delimited columns then
rename them to whatever.xls and ExHel just opens them.

Sorry, I have no idea what you are trying to do with TinyTerm, it's just
a terminal emulator; how can ExHel have any effect on TinyTerm?

Why are you using FTP to a Windoze network? Samba could open a whole
new world for you.

 

[yehoshua.krupnick]

WDS-II is the acounting software written on top of a Progres 4GL
database. I have no control over how the output comes - my MIS
department determines that. As I understand it, Samba runs on the UNIX
box and allows my windows pc to use it as if it was a windows drive. If
that's true, then I have no way to make that happen. If that's not
true, then Samba is way over my head. Either way, I want and excel
routine to send a few keystrokes through TinyTerm to the accounting
system, to make it spit out the reports I need. I would then use Excel
to control the FTP program to move the reports to where I could get at
them. I already have Excel routines that suck up the reports and
massage them into tables that I can then use for financial analysis.

This all may sound kind of like using a guitar to swat a fly, but I
know Excel better than any other computer program and that is why I am
trying to use it to do things it may not have been meant for.

 

[migurus]

I achieve exactly what you want to do by some light VBA programming
under Excel. I use Remote Execution facility to run app on unix box,
for example :
RSH unixbox -l username command

The output I handle in 2 ways.
1) A predefined file on unix, which could be accessed thru ftp from
the VBA
2) I create and open pipe to catch stdout from my app on unix side,
this method requires a bit more VBA, but I have found good examples on
the net.

This solution has been proven to work under 98SE, 2000 ans XP.

One note: when using RSH in the batch mode, as thru VBA here, the user
should have blank password, otherwise rsh waits to get iton stdin, and
I did not find any elegant solution how to feed it password.

Regards,
Migurus.

 

[yehoshua.krupnick]

I don't have any way of getting into the UNIX box other than by using a
terminal emulator, i.e. TinyTerm. Once I log in, I get passed directly
to the menus on top of the PROGRESS database. When I l quit the menus,
I get kicked off of the system. That's why I need some way of working
with the menus to get the reports I want. I tried the RSH command, but
I got logged out immediately. Thanks though for your suggestion.

 

[Skot]

I don't have any way of getting into the UNIX box other than by using a
terminal emulator, i.e. TinyTerm. Once I log in, I get passed directly
to the menus on top of the PROGRESS database. When I l quit the menus,
I get kicked off of the system. That's why I need some way of working
with the menus to get the reports I want. I tried the RSH command, but
I got logged out immediately. Thanks though for your suggestion.

I run a small MIS department and do the same thing with my users. But,
I'd much rather know what it is you need then have you chance making a
mess of things with something as unpredictable as software trying to
navigate through a menu system that I might change at any time.

I hope you are not one of my users.

Skot.

 

[yehoshua.krupnick]

Good point, but I'm looking for a way to get the data sent my way, not
me sending data towards the system. And I'm trying to do this at
2:30a.m. when noone is using the system anyhow. If you didn't have the
time to respond to all requests, and had a user who could deal with
changing menus and other assorted hazards, how would you advise that
user to accomplish this task?